Yes, it's good not to lock ourselves into a particular model, and I'm glad that companies like Discourse are exploring new models of community discussion.
However, from my own personal experience, I have to say that discussions become a lot more interesting when they happen in real-time between small numbers of people. Comments tend to be brief. Topics shift around. People respond to each other. Interjections happen frequently. Opinions can freely mix and mingle in this environment, and the end result is a conversation that can actually go somewhere new.
In threaded discussions, it feels more like people posting their pet walls-of-text at each other. In some ways, the "discussion" is already set in stone from the very start. Furthermore, there's a significant penalty to the upvote/downvote model. It incentivizes groupthink; promotes giant screeds and quippy jokes; keeps topics firmly segregated; prevents the discussion from branching out past an initial point.
I tend to think of this in terms of high context and low context. In that framework, you are identifying high context conversations as preferable. Given that the vast majority of human socialization has been high context (Between people who know much about each other), I don't think this is surprising. It satisfies our instincts and benefits from our habits.
I don't explicitly talk about it above, but part of what I am getting at there is that you can't force a high context situation; it either exists, or it does not.
Maybe the solution is simply to facilitate small groups that discuss things, I don't know. I think I would be disappointed if that is the case, because it would make it more difficult for me to access a wide range of viewpoints. The seemingly overly serious moderation here can probably be described as an attempt at getting people to acknowledge a little bit of extra shared context.
However, from my own personal experience, I have to say that discussions become a lot more interesting when they happen in real-time between small numbers of people. Comments tend to be brief. Topics shift around. People respond to each other. Interjections happen frequently. Opinions can freely mix and mingle in this environment, and the end result is a conversation that can actually go somewhere new.
In threaded discussions, it feels more like people posting their pet walls-of-text at each other. In some ways, the "discussion" is already set in stone from the very start. Furthermore, there's a significant penalty to the upvote/downvote model. It incentivizes groupthink; promotes giant screeds and quippy jokes; keeps topics firmly segregated; prevents the discussion from branching out past an initial point.